Gordon Grant Oral History Interview - Part 1, October 10, 1997

Max Geier: Some of the things you were talking about last time were really good, and I wanted to pick up where we left off. You were talking about what you considered to be your audience, the types of research and writing, and if I recall it right, you were talking about your current efforts to deliberately target outlooks in popular media, kind of warn general publics about the research that is coming out before it actually hits the scientific press, as you called it. Maybe you could talk about what you consider to be the most critical 00:01:00ideas and issues for people to consider about the kind of work you're doing at the Andrews and elsewhere.

Gordon Grant: I just want to clarify one thing that I was reflecting on, a lot of what we were talking about last time was me. And I was I was taking what you were asking as questions involving my individual perspective on the thing. I didn't have a corporate hat on and tried and articulate the Andrews program or anything like that. I assumed that's by design on your part as well, that your job is synthesizing. I have absorbed enough of the ethos around here that I can't clearly distinguish what's my perspective from a broader group 00:02:00perspective, an interesting thing about what happens in this kind of setting. One begins to take on a kind of group, a group-think, it becomes a part of one's own thinking. But I was reflecting upon our conversation before, realizing that a lot of it was, I'm talking about my own background, my own sort of way about going at it, so I'm sort of leaving it to you in that case to tease these things apart.

Geier: Yeah that is exactly what I am looking for. I would be frankly, kind of worried, if someone stood up and said, "This is what the group thinks."

Grant: Yeah, right. So the question you posed, what are the critical issues that people, that I think people ought to be looking at and thinking about with respect to my work and perhaps the broader Andrews work. Is that right?

Geier: Right, and if you think about how your work has evolved from maybe 1985 to the present, what you have learned in that period, and what are the critical 00:03:00issues or content that people would need to understand about the current work is and what the concerns are.

Grant: Good question, let me think about it a minute. When you ask someone in science a question, you typically get an answer that can be more confusing than the original question. And so, one of the things I think we do, I know I do that personally, in respect to a lot of the forest issues, when people ask that if I 00:04:00was given a chance to stand up in front of a million people, sort of, what would you say. To say, "Well, stop, people. Here's what I think you should think about." I think the basic theme that comes through and that I try to articulate, is that issues are a little more complicated than you may perhaps have been lead to believe, and that doesn't mean that it's unapproachably complicated. Or what I try to communicate is, and what I would like people to understand is, if you will give me a little bit of your time, I may be able to help you think this 00:05:00thing through. But at least give you some perspectives that you might find useful in your own thinking and musing about it. That is a very broad statement, but it applies almost across the board to any specific issues I can think of that are focal points in the Andrews. I think a lot of what we are trying to communicate is a little flavor of the complexity of natural systems, and that flavor is an antidote to simple, syllogistic and polarized thinking, which has been one of the dominant characteristics of the debate about the use of forests, and the whole issue of how are we going to manage our forests into the future So 00:06:00what I feel myself doing is reacting in a sense to the framework which a lot of our work is conducted within this larger, polarized debate. Are we going to cut the trees or are we going to leave them? Are we going to have jobs or owls? Are we going to have fish or economic development? That's the kind a very simple, polarized view, and if you shine the light on anybody in the debate, they'll go, "Oh, we recognize it's more complicated than that." But at the point you're talking to large audiences, almost inevitably, what you are speaking against is that backdrop or context of this polarized thinking.

So I view my role as a scientist is to bring some of the flavor of complexity 00:07:00and uncertainty, including uncertainty around those things for which a lot of people have already made up their minds. This reflects back to some things that we were talking about in the last session. When I got started in my work, I knew that we could go up there and find all kinds of evidence of stuff that had happened because we had logged the hell out of these landscapes. I just knew it. And the more I looked into it, the less convinced I was that this was going to be a simple process of showing egregious environmental damage. There was egregious visual damage, I mean, I didn't like the look of these things. But if you're asking how impacted systems actually respond, I found myself more muddled 00:08:00than I expected to be. So, part of my goal in talking about these larger issues, and I am going to get to what the issues are, I haven't forgotten what your question is; I am sort of creating a context or setting for this.

My answer is to try and communicate the flavor of something, and that we don't know these things we think we know as well as one might think. But at the same time, we do know things, and so, it's a fine line to communicate both that, hey, there's uncertainty there, there's more complexity there than you might have previously thought, but we still know something. And the first part turns out to be, I think, easier to do than the second part. The second part, which is to say what it is that we really know, what is it that you can really bank on and can count on, that those turn out to be in some ways more difficult, because in 00:09:00science we're trained to view, to sort of live with uncertainty and teach how we move forward in the face of uncertainty, and to avoid the definitive and the absolute. A lot of what we do is very relative, so it becomes difficult to simultaneously communicate both of those things. It is more uncertain than you may have thought, but we really do know some things.

This translates into the arena in which I actually work; how mountain forested watersheds work. Which is not what most people view as a burning issue in and of itself, as I can't imagine many people in the public outside this field waking up and going, "God, I wonder how and why mountain streams, look the way they do 00:10:00with all these steps and pools and things?" That's a question you only come to after you've sort of dabbled in this stuff for a while. On the other hand, I think the questions many people do wonder about is, what are the influences and effects of human activity on watersheds in various ecosystems? The effects and issues, the things people pay attention to, have changed dramatically over the tenure of my career. When I first started to work on these issues, there had been a history of questions like the following: What happens if you cut this piece of hill slope? What does it do to the stream? Does it change the amount of 00:11:00water in the stream? Does it change the amount of sediment in the stream? Does it change the temperature of the stream? Does it change the nutrient composition of the stream?

The early Andrews program, the watershed program, was set up to answer specifically those questions, in as rigorous of a way as it was possible to do. And the reasons why those were viewed as important questions, ranged from issues around water quality. People wanted to know if we cut our forests, are rivers going to be perpetually muddy? If you go back into the original enabling legislation for the Forest Service, the issue of human activity and relationships between trees and water, is fundamental to the organic act. The idea that the national forests were established to, "Maintain favorable conditions of flow," which congress left undefined, it gives equal weight to 00:12:00providing a sustained-yield [logging]. And one could view the history of forestry in this country as being one in which we largely have had a notion that forests were there, literally for conservation purposes.

So, the issue of forests and water, the history of forests in this country, has been one of Gifford Pinchot's rational forestry with a strong conservation flavor. The forests were initially set aside to keep them out of the hands of the timber factories. But then over the latter part of the century [20th], we have gotten very heavily into one of the purposes, which was a sustainable 00:13:00production of wood. One could view more recent history as being in part, sort of the pendulum swinging to the other side, as we begin to look at the other purposes for which forests are maintained. I think the public in general recognizes this, and certainly over my career, issues other than timber have grown larger and larger until now, they have a really loud voice. The issues of the day are really the warp and woof and tension between these different uses. Congress, with its enabling legislation [U.S. Forest Service Organic Act], may not have initially seen those two uses as incompatible, but because of the nature of population and just time, they've become viewed as increasingly incompatible, although there are ways of reconciling at least some of that. My 00:14:00impression is that the issues, the issues over the course of my career, the issues of what effect does cutting trees have, not just on clean water, but the supply of water in general? If you cut the trees, do you increase the propensity of rivers to flood? Do you increase their propensity to run dry in the summertime? These are the issues that have been, they have really been with us forever, but they were certainly the focal point of the early watershed program.

Then with time as the issues grew, we began to grapple with not just the effects of this timber sale on this hillside on this creek, but the fact that the landscape was now having to respond to multiple sales and roads and other 00:15:00activities distributed across a broad landscape, and that the scale of the human modification of the landscape was growing, and that we anticipated, we expected, or we conjectured, that there may be a commensurably larger scale of the impacts as well. So that is really where my career began, and my dissertation research was specifically designed to address the cumulative effects issue. Which is a very ill-defined issue, when you think about it, and it's a particularly hard one for science to get its hands around, because it's not just the effect of A on B. It's the effects of lots of A's on A, B, C, D and E, you know. And when 00:16:00those effects are manifest over different time and space scales, how do we put that all together? That's really what I got interested in early on. The Andrews program was set up to deal, at least initially, with this smaller-scale question. And it's only with time that we've been able to sort of expand the scope. But at the same time, the issues that motivated that expansion, have kind of gone along. It's sometimes hard to tell which is the cart and which is the dog, that is, the early interest in the expansion of studies, from the effects of cutting on timber sales or regeneration. Sort of a pre-level or plot-level, scaled inquiry, to those broader ecosystems, watershed or landscape scales, what we speak of as the landscape scale, now the regional scale.

There has been this steady progression and expansion of scales and as we've done this, and of course, the issues, have similarly changed. We're now talking about trying to manage and think about our effects on the fish. Fish may be the biggest challenge of all, because it started with the owls. The owls could, in a sense, could be viewed more as a plot, or, as a natural extension of the plot- or patch-scale phenomenon. The idea around the spotted owl was you needed big patches, big areas [habitat]. But it was still that same notion of a range of territory that an organism needs, and we can just extend it to fit our management schemes and recognize there are organisms out there that if we keep nibbling away at the place, they're going to be squished out of their territory-habitat range. Fish pose a completely different challenge, because 00:18:00fish use the whole place. They use the ocean, they use the estuaries, they use the big rivers, they use the small rivers. So suddenly, the scale at which you have to start thinking and doing science, is much larger. But at the same time, the sciences have been evolving, we now have satellites that give us pictures of regions where we can actually interpret the environmental changes over a region in the same way, which is somewhat commensurate in scale to the way certain organisms, we believe, are using the landscape. So, there is a kind of parallelism and it's also, the issues feed the science, and the science feeds the issues.

But getting way back to your first question, the really critical issues are around this question of how we interpret the effect of human activities, over 00:19:00the range of scales at which those effects or impacts are manifest. A lot of what we are trying to do, and a lot of the critical issue in the communication with the public, this is coming full circle, is getting people to think about the right scale, getting ourselves to think about the right scale, and then trying to communicate what the right scale is. Is it, for example, the right scale, if we are concerned about water quality? One of the big issues is municipal water, the quality of water being supplied to municipalities. In the forests, some huge proportion, 70, 80, and in some cases, 90 percent, of the total production of water that's delivered to a city like Eugene or Corvallis or Salem, comes from the forests. One of the outputs of a forest is water. And as 00:20:00cities grow and they push up against the forests, they're creating increased demand, and at the same time, the level of impacts on the landscape are increasing. What we want to know is, "What is the relationship there?" How do we think about our own development and our own use of forests for other purposes, as it effects this one very vital function of forests? We are inevitably faced with the scale question, which is, if we are faced with a creek that's too muddy to drink, is it because we have one bad actor up there, one bad timber sale with a slide that came down hit a creek and muddied the place, because one slide can, can turn up a lot of mud, or is it the pervasive, region-wide set of impacts? 00:21:00Are all of these sort of small, bleeding sores, collectively and cumulatively, creating an effect? Because the strategy you employ to deal with that problem is very different. So, this scale issue, being able to communicate this scale issue, and being able to figure out the scale issue, is a critical piece of the undertaking now, and I see the Andrews work as being one of the places, one of the intellectual playgrounds, if you will, or proving grounds, where some of these issues get tried.

Geier: A couple of questions or comments to follow up on that. One, if you could think about how and why your perception of the appropriate scale at some point in your research shifted, and secondly, and this is probably related, do you have any sense of how or whether the expectations of the public, or by the 00:22:00public, of scientists and what science can do, has that changed much in the last ten years, in your experience?

Grant: You're asking some real zingers. Let me take the first one. When I got into it, I thought I was biting off a big piece by jumping up to this cumulative-effects question. This was really an extension for me, and really, for the science. Because again, the science, were all the little plot or small watershed scales, and there were only a few examples in Redwood Creek in northern California, a couple larger experimental basins where people were trying to ask about the effect of cumulative impacts. I felt I was moving up at that time, and for me personally, it's been a struggle and constant challenge, to figure out how to do science at these broader scales. Because as soon as you 00:23:00get away from the plot, the thing you go out and actually get your hands around and measure, and feel and walk and observe, suddenly you're in a whole other ball game. It's easy to feel outside one's comfort zone on this, and I have felt outside my comfort zone a lot, particularly as more and more questions began to be raised about cumulative effects, and at this larger landscape scale. Then you take it all the way up to the regional scale, and my god, how do you do science at that scale?

So, the problem for me has always been reconciling where these questions are being asked, and where you've got to be able to say something with the tools of science and the standard precepts you get taught in school, the idea of being able to reproduce an experiment, that where the modification itself is kind of a 00:24:00grand experiment happening at the regional scale, with no replication? I mean, it's fundamentally alien to the way you think about science. It so totally challenges your presumption of how to do it. And I personally, have always felt myself to be a bit conservative with respect to how eagerly we take on these larger scale issues. On one hand, I recognize that the scientific community in general, and I would add, the Andrews community in particular, has a lot to say about these larger scale, regional-scale issues. But what we have to say is very often informed speculation, rather than something for which we have hard data. 00:25:00It's a projection, an estimation based on what we think, or what we feel confident saying. Does that get at your first question, which was, which was how; remind me again what that was?

Geier: I was wondering if there were ways in which your understanding of the appropriateness of scale, shifted over time, and I was also thinking about things like major flood events.

Grant: Well, I worked on that from the get-go, so I've always appreciated at some level, that larger scale. I remember watching the flood of '96, and I had a couple of reactions to it. It was a fantastic event for me, and I know there was 00:26:00human misery and suffering attached to this thing, but at the time it was happening, I realized I was watching something I might never see again in my entire life, and how fortunate I was to have witnessed this thing. Here was this little creek that I had waded in and barely got my knees wet. Now this thundering, broad-shouldered beast, was taking logs and rolling boulders with impunity. I was watching this and was utterly fascinated. I couldn't see enough of it. Then, I remember thinking, what I am watching at right now is happening up and down the spine of this entire region, and I was trying to get a feel for that, and I couldn't quite get it. It was really not until we were driving from one place to another in the forest, as we just happened to turn on the radio, at 00:27:00about three or four o'clock on the day, when, really, all hell broke loose. We began to hear, on the radio station in Eugene, and it was clear they had turned all their programming over to dealing with the flood. "We have got so-and-so with a horse stuck out in a middle of a field that needs help, can someone please bring a trailer." You know, "We have people needing assistance over here."

It was clear this thing was playing out at this grand scale, so here was this thing that we here were up there, really seeing it, touching it, observing it, and trying to take movies of it. Suddenly, you are forced to think how this is playing out at this much broader scale. But in terms of the intellectual and scientific basis for that, my training really helped me think. I think I've always recognized things like floods or fires, I mean, you're trained as a geologist and you think about how mountains and plates move and long-time 00:28:00scales. That's fundamental to the training, so it's not that my thinking about the importance of scales that has evolved. I think what I have more of is an appreciation that one can actually do something that looks like science, even if it's not perfectly the scientific method, at these broader scales. That's what's really changed. I have more confidence than I did before that we can say something meaningful. Again, I don't think it's the same thing that happens in a biochemistry lab, where you have an experiment, that if you do this same experiment the same way, you are going to get the same results. It's not like that, but you can apply scientific understanding and test ideas at the landscape level.

The second part of your question is, "How's the public perception changed?" I think there's always been latent reactions in the debate about how forests ought 00:29:00to be used, the scale issue. The issue of wilderness, for example, one I kind of cut my teeth on, was fundamentally a scale issue. Which is, if you got all this area that is cut over here, and here is the pie of natural and public lands, and a huge chunk of it is in this category, and very little of it is in this category. Well, maybe we should be paying attention to that total bounds. That's in a sense what the wilderness issue was about. People were motivated to say, "We ought to be making this slice of the pie bigger, because once it gets into this other slice of the pie, it's, it's incontrovertible. I mean, you can't go back the other way." So, the scale issue has always been there, but I think there has been an increasing sophistication of how we articulate it, and now, 00:30:00with the focus on organisms, like fish, has expanded so that now we have a regional, a widely-accepted, regional problem: the salmon. Now, what I don't think has happened yet, is that I don't think this idea of landscape complexity and dynamics has really introduced itself into the public debate. This is another addition to your question, "What are the critical issues, or what is it that the Andrews group in particular has a role or has played a role in the past in helping to advance?" I think one of the things that we've certainly played with among ourselves, and I think perhaps have tried to communicate with varying degrees of success to the public, is this idea of landscapes as dynamic 00:31:00entities. Reflecting back to the flood, you may have seen this. Have you seen the flood video?

Geier: No, actually.

Grant: You ought to. I'll give you a copy. If I don't do it now, I won't remember.

Geier: Mark was telling me about it. I haven't seen it.

Grant: Have a copy. It's interesting, and there are some interesting issues that surface in that. Geier: These are from the Andrews mostly?

Grant: The Andrews and Siuslaw [National Forest].

Geier: Okay.

Grant: And it [Landscapes of Change -- probable title is Torrents of Change] includes some of the footage we took during the flood of '96, but on the tape, I was asked, "How do I think about the landscape?" And this just popped into my mind when the guy asked me the question. This wasn't a preprogrammed answer, although it now has a certain program quality, because I've said it more than 00:32:00once. But it relates to this issue of dynamic landscapes. I was asked about the way I think about the landscape, one which goes through decades of really not much happening. Decades of boredom, and then something like a flood or fire hits, and you've got hours of chaos. And this concept, it's funny too, because when I was thinking of decades of boredom, I was also thinking about all the hours I've spent up in the Andrews, sort of rattling around in the back of a van, or listening to somebody talk about the forests, and feeling like I really wanted to go to sleep. (Laughter) You know, it's palpable sometimes, the place, but then all of a sudden, boom, you get a flood, or, we haven't had a fire on the Andrews, but I can imagine. If we got a big fire there, it would just blow us into a whole other orbit. So, our own science, could be characterized as 00:33:00decades of boredom punctuated by hours of chaos.

But the concept that is the hardest for ourselves to grasp and communicate, is complexity, even though we live it and deal with it, then communicate that to a wide audience in the public. This is a really difficult challenge because people want to see things in simplistic ways. It's either natural or it's unnatural, it's scared or it's profane; it's pristine or it's manipulated. It's that kind of thing. Well, there are lots of times, probably when this landscape was not an aesthetically- pleasing place, and yet it changed into something else. The 00:34:00nature of that change, the processes that drive the change, and the consequences of that change are things that I don't think we have really grappled with and understood. If I can take a quick aside, you know, it's like going to Europe. You go to a place like Switzerland, and Switzerland is gorgeous. It's a mountain landscape, and there's cute little chalets, you hear the "sound of music" [reference to movie] from every hill, and it is a gorgeous place. So aesthetically, it resonates with our human instincts, yet it's absolutely "unnatural." I mean, it's been walked on since the bronze age. The forests have all been cut, were cut 2000 years ago. It's all been converted to another kind of existence, and yet it still retains some basic qualities and quantities of 00:35:00what it had before.

And so, here in this country, we have not yet converted, we still have remnant pieces, in some cases some pretty good chunks of remnant pieces of what the place looked like before human beings really changed it. And we have a very strong affinity and a feeling that, maybe we ought to retain some of this. And yet what we're faced with is the fact that that in the broad scheme of things, all of these landscapes changes and human beings are just another agent of landscape change. And I don't think we have fully internalized that lesson, it's almost like going from Newtonian physics to Einsteinian, relativistic physics. We still want to see things in the sort of simple-cause-and-effect model. And 00:36:00yet what we are learning about landscapes, is there is no absolute state that any of these places have to be in. They are constantly evolving and changing and turning into other things, and these things have consequences. I mean, there are times in the historical record when salmon completely disappeared from the Columbia River system. But then they came back. They disappeared for like hundreds, if not thousands of years, due to big landslides or something else. So these big disturbances happen, and they change the nature of the real estate, they change who's on the real estate. And that's, I think, one of the issues that we deal with and we are learning to deal with, at the scale of the Andrews or a small forest, but I don't think that concept has really entered the public debate yet.

Geier: I was thinking, one example of your effort to communicate was a good 00:37:00column you had in the Oregonian shortly after the floods and the debate over the landslides. Maybe you can talk about your concerns at that point in writing that article, and what you specifically had in mind.

Grant: What motivated that was coming in, having this long history of discussion about the effects of landslides, and not just landslides, but all effects of forest management on processes like floods. There'd been considerable debate about how human activities exacerbate floods? If so, how much? And for what processes? And there was for me, and I think for Fred [Swanson] as well, a sense there was a lot of common wisdom that was galvanized by the flood itself. That 00:38:00is, people immediately went to what they thought they knew. Which was, thinking this thing's got to be, you know, the Forest Service's flood. We all know that roads and clear cuts and so forth cause landslides, and there were some early reports out where people had gotten up early on in an airplane and flew around, thinking, "Oh yeah, there are a lot of landslides and a lot of them started at roads and clear cuts." That just seemed to me, immediately, the spin-meisters on that side were, you know, talking. Then, on the other hand, there were people saying, "This is just such a huge event, this doesn't have anything to do with human beings; "It's God's flood." So again, we were getting into the simple, 00:39:00syllogistic debate, "Is it God's flood, or is it man's flood?" What motivated us to put that piece together, and I think we were only marginally successful in retrospect, I think we didn't do a good job and think we just further muddied the water by introducing this idea again of complexity, and trying to clarify what that means.

If you read that opinion piece, what we are really trying to say is, "First, we don't know for sure. It's going to take some careful looking to figure out who's flood this is. Second, we do know some things, and the things we know are based on a lot of history and a lot of study by some pretty reputable people, and 00:40:00here's what we think some of those things are pointing to. Third thing, before you start using this flood as an example of something to motivate the current debate about what policy we ought to take, keep in mind that the policy has shifted, but that this has not yet appeared on the landscape yet." There are lag times inherent in this, and a momentum or inertia, landscape inertia, that by the time we decide to do something, the system is already moving in a another direction, and that is like turning an ocean liner around; you got to go a long way before you can go in the other direction. And there have been some significant changes that have not really appeared on the landscape yet, so be careful about how you interpret the results and effects of this flood in light 00:41:00of these new practices. Those were the motivating ideas behind that piece, so you can see where and what it goes back to and what I started with, which is trying to add a little flavor, saying, "It's not as simple as you might want to believe out there." But then, it was interesting because it was then played off against another piece in the same page, which was much more of a here's what we know piece.

Geier: Was there much response to that?

Grant: Not huge, but we got a couple of letters from people. People were actually quite interested in the contrast between those two pieces, and what I discovered in lots of these things, is that these "public" opinions, and I don't 00:42:00know exactly what "the public" is, people hold their opinions in such a way that even when new information pops up, that new information is typically screened and filtered in such a way that those pieces of new information that extract one's deeply held views. It's true in science, too. You read a paper and you narrow in on that piece in that, that supports your biases. It's rare that you get somebody to react by saying: "You know, I used to think of it this way, but because of what you said, I now think of it that way." So, most of the reaction we got was sort of like a "thank you" for writing and confirming me in my bias. (Chuckle)

Geier: That's what I would have expected, actually. I'm curious. You talked quite a bit here about scale and the way in which that tends to create more problems and complexity for doing science. I am curious about two things: One, how much of your work you do off the Andrews, given that, as you were talking, where the scale of the Andrews is a limiting factor? Secondly, at what level does that work on and off the Andrews, satisfy your concern about scientific rigor? In other words, how do you balance the concern about scale and fuzziness of science versus, as you pointed out, your conservative tendency towards scientific rigor? How do you feel about that?

Grant: Boy, I would love to get a list of these questions, because a lot of them are the sort to meditate over for some time.

Geier: This one sort of occurred to me as you were talking.

Grant: No, you're right on and are picking up on some very interesting, and for me, unexplored areas. That's what I am intrigued by, but it is a very useful to think about, first, the facts. The facts are, the Andrews work probably represents, maybe 25 to 35 percent, of my total effort. But that changes with time and projects. After the flood, for example, a lot of what I was doing and thinking was Andrews-based, because here we had this rich store of previous data, we had had the big event, it fell right in my domain, and I was realizing this is something we can really mine. Then, as we got into it, we realized, the 00:45:00Andrews, even for this flood, is only one piece, and there are other places we should go to try and put the Andrews in context. So, we went and took on places formally outside the Andrews, but which displayed phenomenon we were interested in, like other streams that either did or did not experience large flood change. And then, I have been recently doing a lot of work in the Coast Range. Most of it started in trying to understand and develop ways of thinking about the Coast Range in its "regionalness," rather than going out and studying one creek or one bunch of creeks. Then, I've also got a lot of my work, while some pieces were done either at the Andrews or in its environs, it tries to get at things that 00:46:00are not linked to any one place. Ultimately, we would like work at the Andrews to be something that says something about fundamental processes, rather than processes at the Andrews. So, there's a warp and a woof as far as how engaged and involved I am. It's also hard to say, to really add it all up, because a lot of my students, or people I advise, are doing work at the Andrews, which I kind of consider in this fuzzy umbrella of issues on which I have some interest in and activity. The second part of your question was, what's, why don't you repeat it back to me, as it had to do with the how I reconcile the larger scale. Geier: Yeah, you're concerned with the problem of doing larger scale research and the 00:47:00tendency for that to become more difficult to replicate, and your traditional standard in scientific research. I was wondering what strategies you have evolved to try and deal with that?

Grant: Well, it's very much a work in progress. One idea and one thought, is that I've kind of backed into uses of models and modeling, taking advantage of some of the technology, which has really just been amazing. I'm sure you've been getting this from other people, too. The proliferation of technology, in many ways, science is led by technological advances, just like everyone else. The fact that we can do remote sensing, the fact that we can do GIS analysis, has 00:48:00kind of an imperative attached to it: You can, therefore, you must. I resisted some of that, I mean, I know how to make a computer work, but I've drawn the line at learning GIS. Not because I can't do it, but because I don't want that, I don't want to get good at it. Because then I suspect everything, every question, I have would start looking at a question I could only answer with the GIS system. I don't know if that is true or not, it may just be laziness, but I've certainly found myself thinking along those lines, and this modeling is along these same lines. That is, the models, for example, tell me the climate, how much it rains and where, and give me a landscape, and I'll tell you how much water is in the creek over, not just how much, but the time-trend of water in the creek. That's a hydrologic model and I've played some with those. These are 00:49:00things that you really do over big landscapes. You know, you can predict what the flow in a Lookout Creek or McKenzie River is going to be. In the work in the Coast Range, we've begun trying to link these hydrologic models with landslide and debris-flow models, ultimately linking them to channel models. So, you can sort of build these games where you take models in their own right, and then link them together to create larger models or models of models.

All this is very compelling and fascinating, in part, because what it does, is it gives you numbers to play with. You create something and then you run it, and it gives you what looks like data coming out of it. It looks like but it's not, it's kind of a fun house, where what you're getting reflected back at you is, in many respects, what you put into it. That's what I've learned, what I've been 00:50:00trying to learn, as to how to deal with these larger issues, which is that the models give you is a way of generating hypotheses at this larger scale. They give you a basis for saying, "If what I think is true as encoded in this model, the model becomes the encoding of what I think is true, then the system ought to look like this." That then provides something you can go out and look for. And suddenly, I've become more comfortable with using that as the basis for operating at these grander scales. The problem has always been you can't really generate, it's very hard to generate hypotheses, in these large scales. What you can do and what you end up doing, is describing here is what the pattern looks like.

There is a lot of work right now in pattern description which is absolutely vital to science. You've got to start with the taxonomy before you start talking 00:51:00about evolution. You have to know why a bug is different from a lion. But for myself, I find the intellectual challenge to be bound up in saying, "Why does the pattern look the way it does, and how would I know why the pattern looks the way it does? How can I test that?' I mean, that sort of instinct of wanting, and I think this is true for all people who are trying to describe pattern. They are doing it for a reason; it's not just for pattern description. But I really want to jump ahead to that point, you know, I want to find some patterns that have already been described, and then understand why, why are they the way they are. And so that's been the way I've tried to reconcile this larger set of scale 00:52:00issues which is, can we use another way to frame the question, such as, "What are those ways of describing patterns that are really useful in terms of testing models of how a pattern got there?" There's an infinite number of descriptions of pattern. We could run a sensor over the Coast Range and ask, "What is the distribution of gases coming off this landscape, or what is the distribution of water vapor coming off this landscape? Now, that may be very important to try and understand the way the land interacts with the climate or something like that. But for other things, it may not be that important. It may just be a description, and description employs within it that you have an idea about how 00:53:00you are going to use it. And so, that's part of what I've been focusing on in my own work; "What are the really useful descriptions of patterns out there, and what are the scales at which those, that we make those pattern descriptions, and then, how do we use that to actually say something about how it got that way?"

Geier: Good entry into a question I was going to ask later, but this might be a good place to focus. Talking about the use of ideas and descriptives in relation to this hypothesis testing, maybe you could talk a little bit about your understanding of the sort of differences and concerns between what people might call applied research and basic science? What is your take on that?

Grant: Let me jump ahead beyond what I would predict to be the most common, I mean there are easy answers to that; "Well, it's a continuum, and obviously one 00:54:00informs the other." Let's take that as a given, and go to the next step and ask, "What really are the differences?" I think there really are differences, and if you had asked me that question five years ago, I would have probably stayed with the simple answer. I feel that I've been fortunate to have stumbled upon something which is a basic scientific discovery. Basic. I've only done this once in my career. It has such a novel feel to it that I realized it's a gift from the gods, and that if you only do it once in your career, you're very lucky. It 00:55:00feels really different than everything else I've done. It was an insight into what I think is a fundamental property of nature. I don't want this to sound bigger than it is, but it was for me personally, a very big experience. And it's funny too, because it's an experience, that despite the fact I work in a scientific enterprise, is one that I have a very difficult time sharing with my colleagues, because it feels so different than most of what I do, and most of what everyone does. And I constantly struggle here to try and separate my own ego from this. I feel it's a gift. I don't feel it's something, I feel that I was fortunate because of my own experience to be in a place where I could see something. But that's what it was, I mean I just saw it, something that nobody 00:56:00has seen before, or at least has not seen in quite that way.

When I graduated and got my Ph.D., my father gave me a little thing here, by the guy who discovered Vitamin C, Albert St. Georgie, who researches to see what everyone else has not seen, and to think what no one else has thought. I got this from my father, and "Thanks dad," that's really a nice thing and thank you for sharing that, and I put it up on my wall. But I didn't really understand it until I had this experience. I did not realize that there really are times when you can think about things in ways that everyone else has thought about them, and suddenly you see something no one else has seen. So, that is what I consider basic research. I mean, that is the fundamental research experience. And to have 00:57:00that insight, and then try to go and show it, to test it against some real data. That feels different at a fundamental level than most of what I do, which I think of it as much more applied. I want to describe the channel in a way that I can distinguish between logged and unlogged systems. I want to build a model that allows me to test whether the changing pattern of vegetation has had an influence on the character of debris flows and consequences for stream channels. I want to examine the effects of this dam on sediment transport and channel morphology of the lower river. All those questions, they are wonderful questions, and intellectually engaging questions. They have many ramifications, you can extract very useful insights into how nature works from any one of those 00:58:00things, but it feels different.

That's the distinction in my mind. I don't know if that comes through or not, but there's something about the process of looking, of trying, and you can't even do it by trying, that's the thing, as I can't make myself have an insight. You can think about something, you can sort of prepare yourself for it, you can constantly be challenging your own interpretations and experiences, and there are sort of things you can do to create a seed bed, but you can't make it happen. I don't expect it will ever happen again. I mean I really don't. If it does, it's a miracle, because it, the feeling, the other thing about it, is the insight, which I'm happy to explain to you, feels to me to be deeply embedded in 00:59:00what it means to do science. Unlike anything else. What I mean by that, is you can prove it right or wrong. And I also know that if I'm dead wrong on this thing, that is, if I completely am off on the wrong course --

End of Side A, Tape 2 (of 3)

Start of Side B, Tape 2 (of 3),

Grant: -- it doesn't matter, and that too, is a marvelous experience. What it means, I don't really care. If I am asked, I say I don't really care if I am right or I'm wrong, because either way, it makes a contribution. Now, the thing fascinating about this, is that I think this is the greatest thing since sliced-bread, and I've sort of thrown this out there, published on it, and have been met with deafening silence. So, the road, if you look at history of 01:00:00science, it is full of crack pots, and some people think the moon is made of Swiss cheese. But the worst part, is thinking, what I really want is for someone to take this thing on, and prove it up or down. The worst thing is silence, then it's like, excuse me! But, that's part of the game, too. Part of the game is either that this thing is so trivial, which I don't think it is, so trivial that everyone knows it, and alright, what's the big deal about it, or else it's out there on a limb where the stuff in-between hasn't quite developed to the point. Or, it's just dead wrong of what everyone thinks of it, maybe it's not so trivial, but maybe so off-base, no one wants to spend time on it. I haven't quite sorted that out yet. What I really think is that I would love to do is 01:01:00spend some time on this idea, like a year on the reality, the linkage, while there is linkage there between the specific problems of how up the river and so forth, the linkage is miles away. You have to develop this so that it's a tool, or so that it solves somebody else's problem in a very direct way. It's going to take some integration and it's going to take more than I can do. It's a bigger job.

Geier: So part of your problem is resources and funding?

Grant: And just recognizing that this might be important. You see, in the context in which I work, it's not very important. That's the irony of it, is that in the management-driven world, and getting back to your question, what does applied research mean? Well, applied is you got some basic, you got some maybe very basic, but you got some specific problem in mind that you really want 01:02:00to have solved. For example, what is the effect of A on B, even if they're very broadly characterized? What is the effect of cutting trees on streamflow and water quality? That's a very big topic, a career's worth of work right there, but that's where I draw that distinction, because it may not be appropriate to call having a scientific insight as being the only thing that constitutes basic research. But, it's the one thing in my professional experience that has such a different feel to it that I want to call it something else. And I think the applied universe in which I spend most of my time, 90 percent of it, I'd say, is one in which the nature of the work is much more. In some respects, it's basic 01:03:00in that we are trying to understand, how do mountain streams respond to floods? That's a basic kind of question, but it's not very far to jump to ask, "What effect does human activities have on it, and how might we predict the effects in such a way to mitigate consequences of floods on whatever? And we, all of us, use that very short linkage there, even if our focal point is just really to understand floods. We're very quick to grab the human dimension of the problem, the specific, here's what we are going to do, we're going to solve this problem for you. And the environment we live in, we're very eager to go that way, mostly. I mean, part of what I love about my job is I get to do things which I think are relevant to a larger set of societal issues. But, it's been an 01:04:00interesting experience to try and reconcile this thing that feels like it has very deeply, a kind of "science spirituality" quality, and you feel like, "Wow I get it, I really see it, I get what St. Georgie is talking about!" And I don't want to call it more mundane, because the quality of the problem requires just as much intellectual effort, just as much blood sweat and tears to pull off, but there is something different about them.

Geier: It's probably a gross oversimplification of what you're saying, but just to get it straight, because I want to talk about first what the insight was, and then, what the publication was, it sounds like a good example, but my oversimplification is that you just said that basic science is something that you don't really care if it matters to anyone else or not, and applied research 01:05:00is something where one of your concerns is that other people are going to care about this.

Grant: Well there's something, there's some truth to that. It has to do with the level of work and where one cares, the locus of caring. Do I care whether people read about the basic thing? As I was saying, the silence is the worst part of it. I do care about that. Not to the point that I am going to make a big deal of it. For me, it was absolutely essential that I publish this. I mean, it was like a gnawing feeling in my gut until I got this thing out. I had to get it out. And it was an interesting process there, too, because I shot it at nature and science, and said this is tough and almost got into it, you know, very hard to break into that kind of thing. And particularly with an idea that is not really 01:06:00well-developed, not fully-developed, which it wasn't. So, it's not just, in one case I care and in the other case I don't. It's more that I think it has more to do with that I think that true basic science, to be put out there in a way, that whether it's right or whether it's wrong, it represents a contribution to two things: One, is it's put out there in a way that can be shown to be right or wrong. Most of what we do cannot be shown to be right or wrong. I mean you can't, most people won't replicate it, and even if they do, you can't. And most of tests of it are not clear cut. It's interesting, because at about the same 01:07:00time I put this paper out, I put another paper out co-authored with Julia Jones, which had to do with the effects of clear-cutting and road construction on peak flows. This hit the street two months after the flood in February '96. And the reaction to that paper has been 180 degrees. There has been storm and fury around that paper unlike anything I have ever experienced. So, this discussion about what's the difference, is really, specifically looking at the effects of human activities on a natural system using very long-term data and some sophisticated statistical techniques, and we came up with things that could be 01:08:00viewed, in many cases, as either, A, a dramatic new insight, or B, corroboration of something everyone already knew anyways, or C, either absolutely wrong or really sloppy science. The reactions to that have been all over the board, especially in the newspaper, which promoted two different groups to come back and write papers in their own right, specifically directed at this one. The timber industry hired a statistician for six months to completely reproduce our analysis. So, there's reproducibility in the sense of they literally took our data and redid it using their own approaches and techniques.

Geier: What was the journal that came out with it?

Grant: Both of them came out in the same journal, Water Resources Research. I'm happy to provide you with them.

Geier: Yeah, if you have reprints that'd be great.

Grant: So that for me, contrasts how these two things had played out, and now one of the distinctions is truly, that is the difference between these, well, it is the difference. People care about this and they don't care about that, when you come right down to it. That's what it is. And so, maybe the difference has to do, just not so much with whether you care, but whether the work is done in a way that someone else cares. I've never put it quite that way but it's an interesting distinction, it's a potentially important distinction.

Geier: It's an interesting one, because it's a different way of addressing it than most people I've asked that question of have come up with. Maybe you could 01:10:00take this example and talk about it, because I think you're on to something here. First of all, where were you when the insight struck, was this on the Andrews or --?

Grant: Sitting on the beach.

Geier: On the beach?

Grant: On the beach

Geier: Hmm.

Grant: It shows you how odd things happen. The insight hit me on the beach. I was on the beach with my family, and I had always been fascinated by these little channels that flow over the beach. These little tiny channels your kids love and throw sticks in them, and so here's a picture of one. I've always loved them, because they've always been the kind of river you could, get your hands and your feet around, you could walk in them and watch them, and the insight was 01:11:00a recognition that every one of these channels that I had ever encountered in Oregon, which has some specific properties of the nature of the beach, was doing something, they were all doing it. And the fact that these channels that were flowing over the beach, were kind of ultimate channels, in a certain way. By ultimate channels, I mean is they were channels that could do anything that they wanted to do. They are high energy streams because the coastline in Oregon is a high-energy coast. The slope of the beach actually comes from the wave, the 01:12:00ocean wave. And they, because they are high energy waves, they impose a fair gradient on the beach front. These old streams come down off the headlands and they hit this beach front, and they have a high energy with the slope which is kind of imposed upon them by the wave, it's a given, in a sense. At the same time, they have, what they are falling over is sand, and at the slope that the streams flow over the beach, they can move all the sand they want. In other words, they're at that kind of capacity. They are not limited, as most streams are, by the amount of energy they have relative to the amount of the stuff they are flowing through. If we go out to that stream at that flow, you can see the steps. Nothing is moving, the flow and the bed of the channel are not in any 01:13:00kind of equilibrium, or that equilibrium point is way out there. It is only during floods that that thing picks up and moves around. But here is a stream that is totally in a dynamic kind of setting, because it has all the energy it needs, the sand is perfect, because it is completely homogenous. It is nothing else but sand, and then I realized that the fact that all these streams were doing the same thing was telling us something.

But the insight went beyond that, because what I realized was that the process by which these streams were changing, and they were. If you watch these streams, what you see is these little waves building and then breaking, and then, the stream goes back to being kind of flat. Have you seen this? You can if you watch these things. I realized that where I had seen essentially that same process 01:14:00when I had been working in Japan, on why these boulder bed streams form these kinds of steps. And that the concepts of mechanisms of step-pool nature that I had developed in the mountain streams was actually identical to the mechanism that these sand-beds create. So suddenly, I realized I had an idea that spanned, everything from a sand-bed stream to a boulder-bed stream, and everything in-between. So, what happened for me was a combination of being fascinated by these little dinky streams, experience working in these big boulder-bed streams, and then just having this idea because I was interested in how these things form, and then seeing that same mechanism happening in the sand bed. Realizing these were ultimate streams, they could do anything they wanted, realizing that 01:15:00this is a fundamental tendency of all streams that are steep enough and energetic enough to display it; that's what this paper is about.

Geier: In a sense, your scale thing, where you took things off this locale, where you apply it to, almost the global scale?

Grant: It turns out it might even work on Mars. Seriously, I've been in communication with the guy who's the head of the Martian Pathfinder enterprise. It turns out it may even work there.

Geier: They are finding these same channels?

Grant: They are finding sub-channels, and if you start doing flow reconstruction; we are going to be talking in December about that. I was glued to my television set when this stuff came out. But you see how different that is with anything that has to do with forestry, a whole other scale of enterprise, because it represents something that isn't proved, if it's a stream, whether forested, mountain, sand bed, or whatever. It is cross-cutting, so in a nutshell, that's what I came up with.

Geier: Getting back to what you were mentioning earlier about group things. This would be an example where a group thing becomes part of an individual insight. I mean, you were basically involved in this effort to expand the concept of scale in your individual work, and with the LTER. You go on this individual trip to Japan, come back to the Oregon beach, and here's an individual insight that comes out of that.

Grant: That's right. That's exactly right. And something you just said made me think of something that I hadn't really thought of before, which is that it is the experience of thinking across scales, and thinking about how does what I'm seeing here, how might that apply to the larger scale. On one level, that's something intrinsic, as I said, to the geologic or geomorphic training. You know, you get taught that. On the other hand, the experience of doing that is 01:17:00something that I think I got from the Andrews group, and I think I have never properly credited that, and so I appreciate what you just said. I think that's true.

Geier: Maybe you could talk a little bit about who from OSU and the Andrews, would you identify as your closest colleagues or associates, over the last, say five years?

Grant: Probably two. Can I give you two? Dave Montgomery.

Geier: Where is he?

Grant: He is at the University of Washington, and Tom Lisle.

Geier: Tom Lisle?

Grant: Lisle. L-I-S-L-E. At the Arcata [California] Forest Service lab.

Geier: Are they hydrologists?

Grant: Geomorphologists. And a third would be a friend from graduate school who has really been my closest friend/colleague, although we haven't ever written a paper together. And that would be Rob Jacobson with the U.S. Geological Survey.

Geier: Also a geomorphologist?

Grant: Yeah.

Geier: Did you want to add more?

Grant: No. That's it.

Geier: One of the reasons I'm asking this is to try and get a concept of how the group was interconnected with other programs. When you think about your 01:19:00experiences, graduate school, particular universities, John Hopkins, University of Oregon, and Oregon State University, how would you characterize opportunities for interdisciplinary exchange and cooperation here as compared with elsewhere? It's interesting that your closest colleagues away from here are all geomorphologists.

Grant: Well, Hopkins was distinguished by its interdisciplinary program. In one department you have a guy who was on Reagan's council of economic advisors, sharing a hallway with a guy who developed Marxist geography as a discipline. They hated each other, but shared the same hallway. It was a department in which 01:20:00you had people who were studying geomorphology as I was, who were doing sanitary engineering, who were doing systems analysis. It was a department of geography and environmental engineering. So, if you can imagine "sludge" and people who were studying plants and where do you put your pipeline to Alaska, and why are the inner-city folks of Baltimore being displaced by urban renewal, all under one roof, you have a concept of what the place was like. The theme that most commonly brought people together was water. So, there was a kind of organization that was thematic, but the real theme, what really brought people together, was the fact that we had a chairman, Wolman, who was eclectic in his thinking and interests, and who was trans-disciplinary in his outlook. He embodied thinking 01:21:00about everything about everything. Suddenly, everything had value. I got that in my graduate education. I actually got my undergraduate degree through doing an interdisciplinary thing about rivers. When I came here, it wasn't that different from my own experience, so I felt very comfortable. What I felt was comfortable, for it was in fact the lack of a strong complement of people who did what I did. I felt that more, and I've continued to in some ways feel that more than I have felt the interdisciplinary business. And it may be my own failings in that I have not abandoned myself to the true interdisciplinary exercise.

I believe there are people in our group [HJA], Fred obviously jumps to mind, who have themselves sort of abandoned the notion that they represent a discipline. They are really forging their own set of links and their own boundaries, sort of emerging boundaries themselves. I don't think that is what I am doing. I think I am more again, conservative, in a sense that I feel that there's value in having a strong disciplinary base to operate from, and to bring that into a group setting. And so it's true, when I look around, when I need nourishment and 01:23:00sustenance, what I do is interact with colleagues in my discipline, because I really don't have many around here to interact with. In doing so, I really come back in touch with many things that I have a harder time articulating. This business is foreign, I mean these are people for the most part, I work with every day of my life. But, while I've talked about it, the implications and the ability to sort of critically examine it and interact with it, with me over it, and call me wrong, is not inherent in what we do. It's not part of this place. So, I have a different take on this interdisciplinary thing, which is, I clearly have chosen to work within it. I get great value from it in the sense that I 01:24:00feel it has really pushed me out of what would otherwise be a very narrow or much more narrow, disciplinary tendency. I feel that it has really enlarged my world, and that now I can think about implications and consequences in a broader realm than I used to. On the other hand, I also see it as a challenge to sort of be faithful to one's roots.

It's particularly critical, when you think about training students. Because, I now see students being trained as if interdisciplinary-ism was the answer, or something. I think it's an open-ended question as to how you train students to operate in that environment. Do you do it by submerging them in it and teaching 01:25:00them about it? There are some people who I think believe it. I'm not sure I do. I have found too much of my professional consequence comes from feeling like I really bring something to the table that others don't have. It's not "turfism," but it's a sense that there are a set of tools here, or a set of perspectives, that are very useful to this broader enterprise, and I think what happens. I am getting on a soap box here, but my concern in terms of training, is that unless you train people to have that kind of base, a confidence that they can return to draw nourishment from kind of a tap root or spring, you're always in sort of a fuzziness that becomes much more a standard practice. I happen to believe that 01:26:00these disciplines, particularly the ones that have been around for a while, there is a certain set of ideas, there's an identity, an intellectual identity that one can have, that one can bring, and that is in and of itself, and valuable. So, I am afraid that I got afield.

Geier: That's good. You're raising some good points. I want to ask you about the issue of recruiting assistants, because you were talking about graduate students and the concern for instilling in them some base for knowledge. Maybe you could talk about your philosophy or strategy of identifying and recruiting qualified assistants, what kind of graduate students -

Grant: Do I look for?

Geier: Yeah. What kind of qualities do you look for?

Grant: Boy, that is a good question and it's one that's very much a work in progress. I don't feel I've gotten that one down. My history has been that, 01:27:00five, six, seven years ago, I decided that I wanted to have graduate students, that I wanted to make room in my life to be training students, in that kind of more intimate way than one does in a classroom. And initially, I was kind of an opportunist. People would come over and knock on my door, and say, "Well, I'm over here in the geography department, but I'm not really getting what I need or want, and I'm interested in what you're doing. Can I work with you?" And I would say, "Sure, here's something you might work on or have you considered." That really became more formalized after a while, in the sense that I was now getting 01:28:00applications of students and I would start sort of looking at them more critically. But what I was looking for, I didn't have any clear picture of what I was looking for, other than the usual, "I want somebody who can do everything and, you know, comes in with a stellar record and you hit the ground running." I've come to admit that I am lousy at predicting who's going to be good and who's not. And at the same time my search image has changed, based in part on my experience, which has been almost 95 percent good.

But, part of what I've learned, is that having students and training them is a 01:29:00big commitment and investment of my time, and my intellectual capital, and [chuckle] both of which are in short supply. The other thing I've learned is personality counts, and I'm telling you most of my experiences have been great, good to great, so I don't have this long history of either myself getting burned out on the students or them getting burned out on me, in any particular way. But, I know some configurations work better than others. There are some people, for example, the way I train students is the way that I myself was trained, which was a very strongly laissez-faire attitude. Students, the way it worked 01:30:00with Wolman was, you took a number, you got 20 minutes with "the pope," he described, he basically just threw out a bunch of stuff at you, and left you to your own devices to figure out what was important and what wasn't. And it was all important, and you had to figure it out, and I don't pretend that I am anywhere near as insightful, on target as he was. I know I'm not, but I still do the same thing, which is students come in, I say, sit right down, ask what they are doing, and I go off in a zillion different directions, and at the end of their 30 minutes, I try to give them a little more time than he gave me, but basically the same idea, and they go off. And I'm sure about half of them leave here more confused than when they came in. There are some students who take that confusion as a challenge, then work on it and do something with it, and there 01:31:00are other students who just go, "I'm confused and I'm pissed, because this guy is supposed to help me and he is confusing me." So, part of what I've learned to do is to try and select students who fit my style. So for me, the ideal student is someone who is stellar with a proven track record, comes in, instant rapport, requires nothing more than a sentence or two, and is launched. I mean, that's the ideal. It hasn't happened yet, but my concept is really that. Beyond that, I think that I look for students who are able, who are self-starters, who are able to navigate what really are uncharted waters in terms of extracting an education from a place as diverse as OSU, where there isn't at least in my area, a well-trod path.

More students have trod it, but there are some real potholes in that path, and there's not a strong institutional commitment to geomorphology as evidenced by faculty, full-time faculty. I've essentially, Fred [Swanson] and I, sort of, and Julia [Jones], have been filling the holes in what is otherwise not supported strongly by any one department here. I'm not a university professor, I don't whistle, I don't dance to, to university tunes. I'm probably lousy at helping a student navigate the real requirements for serving the university. I know that, and most of the problems I've encountered with students have been that I've had them go off, I see them as doing a research program where it takes a couple years to get your head into the idea of doing research. By that time, university says we want you out of here. So, there's those kind of issues, they're 01:33:00institutional problems that make it hard to function, in the past, even the recent past, I've sort of blithely sort of said, well I'm a Forest Service employee, but I really act like a university professor. Well, I don't really. I have to be careful about that and I've been little bit too glib.

Geier: As a Forest Service employee, you have the option of dealing only with Forest Service technicians and post-docs for filling positions, but you've made this decision to go towards grad students. Maybe you could talk a little bit about the relative merits and problems you've encountered with that very option here.

Grant: It's really a choice. I mean, the choice of going with students, is motivated by several factors. First, I enjoy the interaction with students 01:34:00directly. Doesn't mean that I don't enjoy the interaction with Forest Service technicians also, but I enjoy having these bright minds, and it helps me because they keep me on my toes, and the nature of the discussion is always very, very stimulating. But the other thing is that the way the economics work, there is some equation of time and money. And basically, if you go the Forest Service route, at least this is the way I've thought about it, it costs more money, but takes less time. To go the student route, it costs less money but takes more time. That's an over simplification, but in some respects it's true. A lot of what I do, a lot of my research, is funded in a very cobbled-together kind of 01:35:00way. Not the model that I get this big chunk of money, and then I get to sort of rationally decide how I invested it. And there's a little bit over here and a little bit over there, and then this thing comes up and I got to go. How am I going to spend ten thousand dollars? Well, I'll get a student, you know. It's that kind of stuff, so, some it is just driven by that, the nature of that sort of institutional setting. The other thing is that I find in many respects, the university is easier to deal with, institutionally and bureaucratically, easier for me to stick money in a co-op agreement on the university side, and then have students work on projects out of that, than it is to try and push through a position with the Forest Service. Now, I have to be honest that I haven't really tried. Other people have been successful at it, so I suspect that it is doable too, but in large measure, I find that for many of the things I need, I find the 01:36:00university much more responsive and able to accommodate the somewhat chaotic nature of the work scene more than the Forest Service. So, I tend to use it more, I think, for that reason.

Geier: Some good issues came up here, leading us towards a conclusion here.

Grant: Lead on.

Geier: One of the concerns that I have been trying to grapple with here, is what kinds of issues people find important to bring before LTER meetings, and how that relates to leadership decisions and the decision-making process of the group. These kinds of things; getting funding to hire assistants, what kind of programs get priority funding and to which area of this cobble stone structure of the LTER group. Maybe you could talk a little bit about your perception of 01:37:00how the decision-making process evolved over the last ten years or so.

Grant: The way I think about it is that, the different scales at which decisions get made, there is the scale of allocation of resources in which they are allocated. And that tends to be a process that is driven strongly by the grant writing and funding process. That is when we, the science enterprise, LTER, in my view, gets its clearest focus around writing grants to justify projects and 01:38:00obtain funding. I suspect this is not uncommon. But from a science enterprise standpoint, I think never are we more together or apart, because it has both elements of it, than when we have to sit down and justify our existence to each other. As a part of that, the decisions, the large-scale decisions, about how resources, and particularly new resources, get allocated, tends to be made at that time. As we put budgets together, we define alliances, we define who is doing what, and what their responsibilities are. In the past, there has not been much revisiting of those decisions. So, those decisions, in my view, typically get made at about 5-year intervals, and then you get launched on a trajectory 01:39:00that involves multiple years. And I don't think we have been very good, maybe I shouldn't put it quite that way, but I think it's true, doing the business of seeing how we are doing. Here's what we said we were going to do. Here's who we said was going to do it. Here's how far we expected to be at this point. Where are we? And then making course corrections accordingly. That can be viewed as a kind of rational model of how one ought to proceed. I don't think it works that way around here.

My view is that we tend to make these decisions by establishing what the order of feeding is going to be, the sequence of tasks. Generally, never is there a 01:40:00lot of discretionary money floating around in this outfit, so basically what we do with the grants is we establish who will be in the long-term, who will we support, because there are people whose entire existence is bound up in that. So the way the budgeting works, is we take care of those people first, the people we've decided we want to keep around. And then, we have a little bit left over to play with, and the playing gets doled out amongst a lot of players so that no one person ends up with more than, very much of anything, if anything. I mean, there are people who play without any research funding. Most of my work with LTER has not been funded directly by the LTER grant. Now, there's another piece of that, which is that the LTER funds a whole bunch of ancillary activities. For example, the field crew that goes out and collects all this data, their salaries aren't covered for the most part by LTER, but covered by the Forest Service. But 01:41:00that whole enterprise feeds data directly into the enterprise I then make use of. So literally, there is a whole data, QSG shop and all the computer systems, and there is an LTER contribution there, so we are just talking about resources there. That's one way to look at the way the power and decisions get made. It's basically ad-hoc, with the exception that there are these clear funding priorities that we all agree on, typically without much discussion, and that tends to be arrived at, more or less by consensus, and then, there's a sort of pot-splitting-up that is built around specific tasks and rough lists, and the rough scaling of how much things are going to cost, and what we expect to get done by it. There is some follow through on that, but typically, not a whole lot.

So that is one enterprise, the other thing is the budgetary loop, the resource 01:42:00allocations and so forth, and the set of issues that just keep coming up. Some of these come out of the discussions we have, the science-based discussions, some of them come because of external circumstance, like we have a flood, and then things fall apart during the flood and we got to put them back together again, how do we put them back together? You got money, more money than we need to just put it back the way it was, so how do we change it to make something better. What are some long-range goals for long range measurement? Facilities like the climate station. We expanded the climate station over the last five years. How was that decision made? Well, a climate group met and put forward proposals and put a budget together, and managed get external support. And we 01:43:00are kind of told to do that by the group as a whole, and there was also a blast at the end. So, again operating sort of on a consensus level, there was generally enough credibility with people, and members of the group held in high esteem stand up and says we really need to do this thing, there often is not a lot of debate. It tends to be more, well so and so thinks we ought to do, I guess we ought to do it. There is a lot of that that I think goes on, to the Andrews' credit, and, basically, it's a group that functions well at that level.

I think there's some places were the group doesn't function as well, specifically because of that. We don't deal with conflict very well, and don't have a lot of experience dealing with conflict well. We tend to suppress it, and 01:44:00so some of that even comes out as suppressing debate, in other words, we have a tradition of not having contentious forums for debating these things. It's much more that people of different domains, identified and accepted domains of activity, in which they make decisions that the group as a whole operates to kind of bless decisions that often get made at a finer scale. And there isn't a lot of real challenging that goes on, except every so often something happens, and then, you really are faced with the fact that, not only might you not agree about everything, but you really don't have a lot of history in disagreement, so it has a different feel. It's like two people who never fight, suddenly having a 01:45:00fight. Suddenly, whoa, what's going on here? As opposed to two people who're always sort of having discourse. You know, then the weighting looks different. I'm getting a feel here, I think it has to do with not so much with how the decisions get made, but with the process of the group is for dealing with it.

Geier: How has the group dealt with that kind of conflict then? Lacking that experience and background, what's the outcome when that kind of thing does occur?

Grant: There is a lot of one-on-one talking that goes on. The group as a whole tends not to deal with it. It tends to fall to a few people in leadership positions to reconcile and work it out, often in ways that are not clear, not transparent to the group. But that's where the grapevine and the other webs and 01:46:00back-channel ways that people communicate among themselves kicks in.

Geier: So, that's where people like Art and Fred would make the decisions?

Grant: That would be a perfect example. Then, I don't know how much you know, but this is an issue that has gone on a long time. You are talking about Art and Fred in leadership roles?

Geier: Yeah, that's right.

Grant: But there are other issues. I mean, it's a bunch of people, and people have issues and problems with each other, and different styles of doing things. So that would work in different situations, but typically, issues tend to be isolated, and what happens, my impression, is people who don't feel that those issues were fairly dealt with in the resolution of those issues, they typically 01:47:00just disappear from the group. They dropout. Now again, I don't have another model for this, there are lots of other models, but I'm not arguing that there should be another model. I'm just looking at what happens, and again, this is my perception of it. But it is an interesting dynamic, because I think it's a little bit like the dynamic that goes on, if I may globalize a bit, it's like the way in a pluralistic society, there is a real premium on getting along. And we're in a pluralistic, an interdisciplinary, pluralistic society. There's a real premium on getting along.

In large measure, because in most cases, there is only one fish biologist or one 01:48:00geomorphologist. From a purely professional level, I don't understand what a fish biologist does. I don't know what is important. I count on him to tell me what is important. So it's interesting, and again, I'm maybe getting a little far field, but I think that the way our [Andrews group] ecosystem works is that there are niches that people fill, and it's probably very difficult to be another person, like another geomorphologist wanting to break in to this group where there is already somebody occupying that niche. So, in that sense, I haven't gone all the way with this. One of the problems, I think with training, is that we want really good people to come in, but you have to open, you have to make room for them in some way, and that room has to include intellectual room, has to include disciplinary room, has to include social room.

I think the way we have tended to operate is that we have a limited number of people, and they each have a portfolio, and then we count on everybody to represent that portfolio. Typically, there is a certain amount of, we don't talk about how do we make sure what's happening within that portfolio is really first-rate stuff? We leave it to the people within to do that themselves. How do we make sure that there is the next generation that's emerging within each of those portfolios, assuming we want the same group, the same set of issues, to be represented? I think, instead, we accept that we are going to evolve in some other direction, people will come in, and in many cases they come in, identifying and then occupying uninhabited niches, using an ecosystem model. I think that, I haven't put it all together like that, but I think that's true. 01:50:00Like we got into remote sensing, because suddenly there wasn't anybody doing that, and somebody shows up and says, "What a coincidence, you know, I can do this." Hey, great.

Geier: So, if any sort of a peer evaluation goes on or takes place in the group, it sounds like with your geomorphology work, how people outside the group view it, is kind of your gauge of excellence?

Grant: Right. Exactly. Entirely. Entirely. Geier: Some people have talked before about how, say someone comes in and isn't meeting somehow the standards of the group, the common way of dealing with that, is that person simply doesn't get funded. The way you were just describing this, if I was following you right, is that those funding decisions are group efforts, in the grant-writing process and decisions of where is this money going to be allocated. So, from what you've been just saying here, it's sounds to me, and correct me if I'm wrong, it sounds to me like there's this political component too, that gets to be some kind of 01:51:00group acceptance to maintain that level of funding, and that it could be, as likely to be a community-based decision as it would be, say science-based or peer-evaluation based?

Grant: Well that's an interesting question. I don't know if we have ever been really challenged on that, because what the challenge would be is if we had someone who was doing first-rate science and didn't get along. I don't think that has ever happened. I think, and my suspicion, would be based on the way the group tends to function, is that if there is somebody doing first- rate science that nobody could get along with, they would not automatically be pushed out of the group. In fact, quite the opposite. It would be more likely that you would, the way the group is more inclined to work, is somebody not doing first-rate science, who everyone likes, would be continued ad infinitum. I have nobody in 01:52:00mind when I'm saying it, but that would be more in keeping with the tendency of this group, because of the common culture.

Geier: Several other people have made the same observations.

Grant: Yeah, that you would, because there is such a strong imperative for getting along. Because there is no one else who speaks your language, or you could convince yourself that you don't really speak somebody else's language. That nobody is really held accountable, I mean the accountability is really the big issue, a big issue. And I look at my own actions. I'm not sure I've been accountable for things I've gotten from the group. And there have been, but we have no mechanism really for even holding people accountable, and I don't really think anyone really wants a mechanism like that, to be honest.

Geier: Keep the informal structure, is what they're saying?

Grant: Yeah, it's all informal. Now as I say, most of the time that works very well. And I think it's the success of the group that we've been able to survive 01:53:00without a lot of formal structure around it. It has worked remarkably well for having been so informal, and at the same time, allowing different leaders to emerge, who are real leaders and really do have those abilities. I think this system would break down if there wasn't at least one person who could play a leadership role. If that happened, the structure could easily fall apart, because we don't have a strong set of internal mechanisms and processes for resolving conflict. It's mostly been done, because we identify somebody will be a leader, and they will resolve it if it shows up. That's what I think happens. If we lose a leader, it just puts us in certain kind of vulnerability because the ability to resolve and endure is not necessarily the way we would go in a group. The turning point would be if you have an identified leader who does it, 01:54:00but people don't think of them as a leader. If somebody were to advance into that role, and no one could agree that they were in fact the leader, I think, that it is probably the key vulnerability of our group.

Geier: It's an interesting point, because as you were talking about that, it dawned on me that I've never asked this question of anybody, and that is really simply, how leaders are selected? I know that with Jerry [Franklin], he just kind of evolved into the group, and then, I know that there was a transition from Jerry to Fred [Swanson]. Jerry essentially identified Fred as the likely successor. But I was wondering if there was any process of ratification by the group of that decision, or how did it go?

Grant: There may have been, but I was not part of it. I want to make sure you 01:55:00understand who you're talking to here, in that I don't consider myself to be strongly embedded in the power structure. I consider myself a player, but I've not been in the room when a lot of decisions got made, either by personal choice or schedule. Most of it's been by personal choice, and I always have the sense that if I wanted to play more of a role there, I could, because my program is in research. But I go off in a lot of different directions, not all of which are the Andrews, and I feel myself intensively mortgaged for time, and recognize some of the limitations. I'm just telling you that so that you understand that that you're getting a limited view of the way things work. But my impression is that it's done on a very ad-hoc basis, and that Fred just, "naturally stepped 01:56:00forward." For Fred, one of the things that made that easy was that he had a longstanding tradition with the group, has a personality style in which he doesn't create a lot of enemies, so there wasn't an invested constituency, an anti-Fred constituency, at any point. He has been very, very effective at that. And the third thing was, he had a different enough style from Jerry, that the people who were sort of burned out, there were some ways that Jerry managed things that Fred did differently, so that in a sense made it easy for everybody to coalesce around his leadership.

In my view, he has been very effective in that role, and finally, he's one of the few people I know who can actually hold in his mind what everyone is doing. 01:57:00He probably is the only guy in the whole operation who really understands, at least to a first approximation, what everyone is up to. The organization needs at least one of those. That requires someone truly interdisciplinary in their own thinking, because you have to be able to not go into a discussion with somebody thinking, my discipline is the most important and everything else is sort of a support. Fred generally doesn't do that. If he's talking to someone who's doing plant ecology, or GIS, microbial maps, or something like that, he can understand and think about it at the level at which they're thinking about it, rather than his own view. So, in this constellation of a group, that's a very, very important glue, because that way, you have at least one person who sort of does what Wolman did in the department in which I was training. Probably 01:58:00what I would have to say, the most important ingredient for a successful LTER operation is to have least one of those.

Geier: I've talked with Fred about this, and Art [McKee] also, but it's useful to get the insight from someone who's, as you say, not at the heart of the whole issue. I was curious if you had any perceptions of how the mechanics of the transfer of leadership roles worked. Does it involve something as simple as taking leadership in the LTER discussions or-.

Grant: Oath of office. (Chuckle) I think, it grew out of, um you know those times.